emotional-intelligence
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Michael Belhassen Got His Dream Job. Then He Left.
At 12, Michael Belhassen wanted to work at Apple. After five years designing iPhones, he left to build Anoria - and pursue a question he says had occupied him for a decade.
Todd Delano Learned to Count What a Company Cannot Afford to Lose
The finance-trained founder built ServRx by mastering an obscure corner of pharmacy billing. Then growth forced a harder calculation: how to measure trust, repair a culture, and carry the lesson from claims desks to basketball courts.
Julie Kantor and the Invisible Glue Holding Work Together
The New York business psychologist has spent more than two decades studying what makes people work well together. Her answer is less about office attendance than the human connections leaders can no longer leave to chance.
Betsy Walker Put a Backbeat Behind AI Security
At Cranium AI, Betsy Walker has made a difficult category legible with an unlikely toolkit: emotional intelligence, college football, Halloween ghosts and a very loud rock show.
Jenny Shao Left a White Coat for a Memory Machine
She spent years studying how people remember, then walked away from a mapped-out medical career to ask a stranger question: what would software become if it could carry the history of a relationship?
Anoria Wants to Put a Number on Your Mood - Then Teach You What to Do With It
The ex-Apple team behind Anoria is betting that the next useful wearable will track the thing sleep scores and step counts only circle around: how you actually feel. The opportunity is intimate, useful and full of hard questions.
Scale Yourself
Scale Yourself is a coaching and content platform for venture-backed startup founders, built by Amy Buechler - a licensed psychotherapist who spent nearly five years as Y Combinator's first in-house founder coach. It combines one-on-one coaching, a vetted network of ex-founder coaches, and a free framework library called The User Manual for Founder Psychology to help founders scale their psychology, relationships, and leadership alongside their companies.
Inflection AI
Inflection AI is a Palo Alto-based artificial intelligence company, structured as a public benefit corporation, founded in 2022 by Mustafa Suleyman, Reid Hoffman, and Karen Simonyan. Originally known for the empathetic consumer chatbot Pi and its Inflection large language models, the company was reshaped in March 2024 after Microsoft licensed its technology for roughly $650 million and hired most of its team. Under CEO Sean White, Inflection re-founded itself as an enterprise-focused AI provider, selling data-secure, customizable models (Inflection 3.0) that let organizations own their intelligence, data, and infrastructure - including an on-premises appliance developed with Intel.
Alain de Botton
Alain de Botton is a Swiss-born British philosopher, author, and entrepreneur who has written 15+ books translated into 30+ languages, co-founded The School of Life in 2008, and built a global movement dedicated to making philosophy practically useful for everyday life - covering love, work, anxiety, and what it means to live wisely.
Mursion
Mursion is a San Francisco-based AI-powered upskilling platform that uses live human 'simulation specialists' to puppet AI avatars in immersive role-play scenarios. Founded in 2015 by Mark Atkinson and Arjun Nagendran, the company trains leaders, salespeople, teachers and healthcare workers in the high-stakes conversations that are hardest to rehearse in real life.
Sean White
Sean White is the CEO of Inflection AI, the Palo Alto public benefit corporation behind the empathetic chatbot Pi. He took over in March 2024 after co-founder Mustafa Suleyman and most of the team left for Microsoft, and has since rebuilt the company around emotionally intelligent enterprise AI that runs on-premises. A Stanford- and Columbia-trained computer scientist with a deep background in augmented reality and wearable computing, White was previously Chief R&D Officer at Mozilla and head of the Interaction Ecologies Group at Nokia.
Mark Atkinson
Mark Atkinson is the Co-Founder and CEO of Mursion, an AI-powered immersive learning platform that blends live human performers with artificial intelligence to create realistic practice simulations for professional development. An Emmy Award-winning television producer turned serial edtech entrepreneur, Atkinson has spent over two decades building technology ventures at the intersection of human capital development and innovation. Before Mursion, he co-founded Teachscape, a pioneering video-based teacher observation platform that became central to the Gates Foundation's Measures of Effective Teaching project. Under his leadership, Mursion has grown to serve more than a third of Fortune 100 companies, delivering 18 million-plus minutes of simulation-based training across healthcare, education, corporate, and hospitality sectors.
Ken Norton
Ken Norton is a veteran Silicon Valley product leader turned executive coach. After co-founding Grand Central Communications (acquired by Google as Google Voice), spending 14 years at Google and GV shaping products used by over three billion people, he pivoted to running Bring the Donuts - a coaching practice for CPOs, VPs of Product, and Founder/CEOs. His 2005 essay 'How to Hire a Product Manager' is still considered the canonical PM career bible two decades on.
Emotional Debt: Chase Hughes on the Hidden Cost of Unfelt Feelings
In this solo lecture, behavioral scientist and human behavior expert Chase Hughes introduces the concept of 'emotional debt' — a neuroscience-backed framework explaining how unprocessed emotions don't disappear but compound in the nervous system like interest on a loan. Drawing on biology (amygdala hypersensitization, the HPA axis, prefrontal cortex degradation), somatic science, and psychology, Hughes argues that what we call 'personality' is often just a collection of unpaid emotional invoices from childhood. He outlines five steps to process emotional debt: see the payments, name your debt-servicing behavior, let the body finish incomplete responses, stop taking on new debt, and get a witness — all united by a single active ingredient: perspective shift.